Facebook has claimed to have taken the next step in targeted digital advertising as it begins to roll out its Atlas platform in Australia.

The social media company acquired Atlas in 2013 but relaunched the technology – which allows marketers to track Facebook users when they visit other sites – last October.

It has already relaunched the product in the US and Europe and is now ready for a concerted awareness push locally.

Head of Atlas Erik Johnson said the technology is a superior and more sophisticated version of cookies which he said have “fundamental flaws” as they don’t track users across different devices.

Leigh Terry: ‘Cookies have been a loyal servant of digital marketing’

“If you’re a marketer and you want to reach somebody on Facebook you can do targeting based on demographics and find those people,” he said.

“But if one out of every three minutes is spent on Facebook in Australia there are still two out of three minutes where people are on other publisher’s sites. And if you’re a marketer, one third is not good enough. You need to reach everybody.”

That is where Atlas comes in, Johnson told media on a visit to Sydney, with brands able to “find those people” no matter what device they are using.

“Rather than just running ads all over the place and hope to reach them, I can actually meet those people where they are and target the ads. That’s our focus,” he said.

“We are trying to solve a couple of fundamental problems for marketers. If you look at the data and where people are spending their time, they are spending it on mobile devices. Roughly three hours a day, or 25% of their time is spent on their mobile device.

“But in a typical marketing plan, only 10 to 11 per cent of the marketing budget will be assigned there and there is a gap because of the cross devise problem. Cookies don’t work particularly well on mobile.”

Omnicom is among the agencies working with Facebook through Atlas, with chief executive Leigh Terry insisting it will create improved efficiencies for clients.

“The cookie world has been a noble servant to internet marketing, and while this (Atlas) is not the silver bullet, it is making it a lot closer to having targeting capabilities with less wastage,” he said.

“There are still challenges around viewability and bot traffic but the fact that Facebook is people, as opposed to bots, helps on that front.

“From an efficiency perspective it is providing better bang for your buck. It’s why we started to get involved.”

Asked whether Omnicom clients were receptive to increasing their digital marketing markets, Terry said the attitude was mixed.

“Some are massively over indexing and there are others we are still trying to convince to dip their toe in the water,” he said. “There are evangelists and conservatives and everything in between.”

Johnson stressed Atlas would focus on age, gender, location and device type and stressed it was”very sensitive to the question of protecting confidentiality and privacy”.

I know I am a weird outlier, but I really don’t want to be “tracked across different devices”

^^^^^^
Head of Atlas Erik Johnson said the technology is a superior and more sophisticated version of cookies which he said have “fundamental flaws” as they don’t track users across different devices.
^^^^^^

“But if one out of every three minutes is spent on Facebook in Australia there are still two out of three minutes where people are on other publisher’s sites. And if you’re a marketer, one third is not good enough. You need to reach everybody.”
Three huge problems with this.
1. Often, 1/3 of a mass audience is more than enough.
2. 1/3 of time on Facebook does not mean 1/3 of reach is the ceiling even within the Facebook audience more that the projection would be around 1/3 but even that will vary by time of day, day of week etc.
3. Facebook with about 12m active users in Australia means they can reach 50%. How is that everybody?

It’s these kinds of poorly thought through claims and calculations that show the arrogance of the publisher and their lack of basic understanding of maths.

It’s obvious Facebook want to be all things to all people (and especially marketers), but perhaps teach the talking heads to count before smiling for a PR pic.

what exactly is a “superior and more sophisticated form of cookie”? so if its not a cookie what is it?

Is it somethign that uses current web standards (W3C)

how does it handle apps (or is that another silo?)

come on everyone, tech is so fundamental to what we do we need some actual facts not spin for marketers who actually wouldn’t; recognize a cookie if they saw one.

what we have here a tech vendor (atlas aka microsoft) spinning a so called solution to their new owner FB, who spin it to an agency (OMD) who spin it to a client.

So this might actually be real and might actually work but its impossible to validate that by the vague, vacuous reporting in typical media publications. Go hel pthe client in a world where their advisors and the people they buy media from don;t actually understand what they are selling.